


Show Pony

by rabbit_hearted



Category: Purple Hyacinth - Ephemerys & Sophism (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, I know that sounds weird, but see for yourself, its soft though i swear, the fight club AU literally no one asked for, the simpery in this one is off the charts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:15:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27634643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_hearted/pseuds/rabbit_hearted
Summary: He pulled his hand over his bruised jaw thoughtfully. “It’s not illegal to sit outside.”“Not illegal,” she conceded, narrowing her eyes. “But some might consider it frowned upon to bleed all over the sidewalk of a public establishment.”Kieran lowered the bag of peas and set it on the curb beside him. “If anything, I enhance the curb appeal. I don’t know about you, but nothing whets my appetite for waffles like the sight of a busted lip.”(Or: The Fight Club AU no one asked for)
Relationships: Lauren Sinclair/Kieran White
Comments: 18
Kudos: 84





	Show Pony

**Author's Note:**

> Some minor descriptions of violence and blood. Nothing terribly graphic, but do proceed with caution. ❤️

Whoever designed the diner had an inclination towards the color blue.

Blue tiles and blue lights and creaky blue booths with soggy old french fries and crayons stuck between the folds. All of that blue made everything seem colder than it actually was, but it was July, really, all sticky, wet heat like tepid bathwater. Kieran sat in the buzzing halo of the 24-hour sign with a frozen bag of peas against his cheek, wondering if everything would have turned out differently if he’d just kicked Sake’s face in in the way he’d meant to. He was thinking about this so intently, in fact, that he didn’t notice she had come out of the diner until she was right in front of him.

“That your blood?”

The girl watching him had sharp, contrasty features, as though she’d been designed by a practiced hand. Red hair and golden eyes and a pursed, mean sort of mouth. Whip-sharp and looking at him as though he was dirt beneath her tennis sneakers. Unbearably sexy, obviously. For a minute, he was so stunned he could hardly speak.

Kieran blinked down at his stained collar. He was still wearing his work shirt, a cream button-down he’d ironed just that morning when it had looked less like a Jackson Pollock painting. “Some of it,” he answered truthfully.

The girl made a vague little huff of affirmation and crossed her arms over her chest. “My manager told me to come out here because you’re fucking up the curb appeal.” She hitched her thumb back in the direction of the diner.

Kieran glanced over his shoulder, then back at her face. “You work here?”

“Yep,” she said slowly, letting her lips pop around the 'p'.

He pulled his hand over his bruised jaw thoughtfully. “It’s not illegal to sit outside.”

“Not illegal,” she conceded, narrowing her eyes. “But some might consider it _frowned upon_ to bleed all over the sidewalk of a public establishment.”

Kieran lowered the bag of peas and set it on the curb beside him. “If anything, I enhance the curb appeal. I don’t know about you, but nothing whets _my_ appetite for waffles like the sight of a busted lip.”

Her mouth started twitching at that, as though she was fighting a grin. “Seriously, who pissed you off?”

“No one,” Kieran replied. “You shouldn’t fight someone when you’re pissed off. It’s bad form, and you’ll probably lose.”

“So you go around beating people up for _fun_?”

Kieran winced for reasons that had nothing to do with his black eye. It was depressingly close to the truth. “Not for fun.”

“Money?”

He lifted a shoulder in a shrug. Vocalizing it felt shameful.

Her expression was curiously blank. It wasn’t approving, surely, but it lacked disgust or apprehension. She tilted her head, as though considering something. “You want a cup of coffee?”

“Would love some,” Kieran answered earnestly, pushing himself to his feet. “Goes great with peas.”

“So I’ve heard,” she quipped. She tossed him a haughty look, her red ponytail swinging as she breezed past him.

“How long have you worked here?”

“Too long.”

He trotted to keep step beside her as they pushed through the swinging doors and into the greasy diner. A tinkling bell announced their arrival, but nobody looked up to acknowledge it. The few patrons out at the late hour were scattered and in various states of dishevelment, grizzly old regulars that looked like permanent fixtures.

“Is your name actually Bertha?” He asked, pointing at her name tag.

She snorted. “No.”

“Why’re you wearing that, then?”

“I don’t want these people knowing my name.”

It made sense. They were in Greychapel, after all — Ardhalis’ dirty little afterthought, like the sludge left behind by a melted snowbank. He spent a moment inspecting the two unoccupied booths and dropped into the one that looked less visibly sticky. “What’re you doing working in a diner in this part of Ardhalis?”

“You sure do have a lot of questions,” the girl snipped, her eyes narrowed. She disappeared behind a corner and returned a moment later with a chipped ‘I ♥ Ardhalis’ mug and a steaming, sludgy-looking pot of coffee. “It’s a part-time job while I finish law school.”

“Law school,” Kieran repeated thoughtfully. He took a sip of her coffee and coughed, wiping away the dribble on his chin with the back of his palm. “Wow. This is horrible.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” The girl replied, sounding patently unapologetic. She glanced at her watch and then sat down across from him, placing the pot between them. Her eyes were fixed on the deserted parking lot when she spoke again. “My real name is Lauren.”

Kieran sat back, crossing his fingers over his abdomen. “Kieran.” The glow from the blinking Christmas lights overhead sunk in the planes of her sharp features and made her look tired. “Why do you have Christmas lights up in July?”

“Why do you have a black eye?” Lauren replied challengingly.

“Touché,” Kieran hummed.Then he leaned forward, drumming his fingertips against the tabletop. “I have another question.”

She fixed him with an irritable look but flicked her palm in a goading motion.

“Why’re you working in a diner?”

“I already told you-”

“No.” Kieran leaned back and the booth creaked underneath him. “I mean, why are you working in a diner when you don’t need the money?”

For a moment she said nothing, simply watched him with that sharp gaze. When she finally spoke, her words were laced with a sort of tentative admiration. “How did you know that?”

He grinned, tapping his index finger against the rim of his mug. “Your coffee.”

Lauren tilted her head, appraising him with keen, unflinching attention, as though searching for something in his expression. And then she reached into her apron pocket and withdrew her notebook.

“I have to get back to my shift,” she said, scrawling his total onto the paper. “Feel free to stick around, as long as you don’t bleed all over the table.” She slid the check over to him and left without so much as a backwards glance.

He paid in cash and doodled a little bag of frozen peas on the back of the receipt.

* * *

Kieran won the next fight.

It was a cheap shot at the end, a right hook that landed just above Anslow’s brow and fractured his orbital bone. Kieran stood panting over his crumpled body with a cigarette hanging limply from his lip, rooting around his conscience for guilt and coming up empty.

“I knew you had it in you,” Bella sneered, appearing at his side like an oily shadow. She pressed a few crumpled hundreds into his hand. His knuckles were raw and left little red smudges on the bills. “You had me worried after that shit show with Sake last week.”

“Uh huh,” Kieran intoned boredly, turning to leave.

Bella clicked after him in her pointy red heels, her pink hair swinging around her pouting face. “Come back to my place for a nightcap?”

He didn’t have any desire to have sex with her. He’d done it before and found it exceedingly depressing. “Not this time.”

Her lips twitched into a scowl. “Oh, you’ve got _plans_ , then?” She spat the word, as if the concept alone was too ridiculous to even entertain. Kieran knew she was just embarrassed by the rejection, but he wasn’t in the mood to coddle her feelings.

He pulled on his shirt and began fastening the buttons with slow precision. “No.”

“No as in, you don’t have plans?”

“No as in, I don't have plans with you.” Kieran pushed open the heavy metal door of the old warehouse, sighing in relief when the balmy breeze made contact with his skin. After sucking in lungfuls of stale, hot air for the past hour, it felt like a salve. He pulled in a deep drag from his cigarette and tipped her a two-fingered salute. “Goodnight, Bella.”

“Dick,” she spat petulantly.

Kieran walked through the hazy twilight with no particular destination in mind, his gaze tracing patterns in the rain-bloated horizon. He’d learned in college that the patterns that existed in nature tended to reveal themselves in much of the same way on a canvas, but as he peered into the bruised skyline, he couldn’t find the design in any of it. 

He hadn’t realized he was walking to the blue diner until he was already standing in the sad little parking lot. This time, he didn’t wait for her to find him there. He pushed through the double doors and dropped stiffly into the first available booth.

Her voice rang over the clatter of the dishes in the kitchen. “Be out in a minute!”

Someone had left a paper menu and a box of crayons on the table, so Kieran busied himself with a simple sketch of the lone pickup truck in the parking lot, a sad, beat-up thing with a sagging bumper. He was just adding color to the outline when Lauren breezed through the kitchen doors and drew to a slow stop in front of him, her mouth propped open in a breathless huff.

Kieran blinked up from his drawing, twisting the crayon back and forth between his forefinger and thumb. “Do you think things happen for a reason?”

She looked a little flustered. There was a pink flush in her pale cheeks and a few flyaways had escaped the wispy knot she’d tied her hair into. “Wait here,” Lauren demanded, holding up an index finger.

He nodded obediently and she turned away, rooting noisily behind the counter for something. After some searching, she reappeared at his booth with a handful of ice cubes wrapped up in a rag like a neat little parcel.

“Get that on your lip.”

“Thanks,” he mumbled.

Lauren nodded and left to make to make her rounds, returning a few minutes later with a cup of coffee and, this time, a waffle. “Figured you might be hungry,” she said, sounding uncharacteristically shy, almost embarrassed. She set the waffle and the coffee down in front of him and dropped into the seat opposite. “And no, I don’t.”

“You don’t…”

“Think that things happen for a reason. Most of the time, anyway.”

“Ah.” He poured some syrup from the sticky dispenser over his waffle and tucked eagerly into it, considering her response as he chewed. “That’s depressing,” he chirped sunnily.

“You were the one who asked,” she huffed. “It’s not depressing. It’s just practical.”

Kieran glanced up, grinning bemusedly. He got the sense that she was very practical in all things. “It’s practical _and_ depressing.”

* * *

He visited the diner unannounced.

Sometimes on weekdays. Sometimes so late at night that it was technically morning — On those occasions, she’d tilt her head and narrow her bleary eyes at him in wordless admonishment. Sometimes he’d stop by for brief visits, just long enough to order a cup of her terrible coffee and draw her a picture. Little doodles done in whatever he had on hand — dull crayons and ball point pens and, on one particularly creative occasion, a ketchup packet.

She didn’t say anything about it until around a month of knowing her.

“You draw.”

It was a late night and he’d stopped by after he narrowly winning a fight against McTrevor that had left him with a bruised jaw and an aching ear. She said the statement in a flat, vaguely accusatory tone.

Kieran looked up from his waffle with a question in his brow. “Huh?”

“The doodles. They’re pretty good.” She reached into the pocket of her apron and removed one of them, the drawing of the rusty old pickup truck with the sagging bumper.

Kieran’s mouth propped open as he stared at his drawing, suddenly at a loss for words. It looked different in her hand, somehow. Renewed. He flicked his eyes up to her face and then back down again.

A long moment passed before he finally spoke. “You kept it?”

“I keep all of them,” she replied factually.

“Why?”

She looked perplexed. “I like them.”

“But,” Kieran stuttered. He reached for the drawing and plucked it from her outstretched hand. “They’re just doodles.” 

“So?”

“ _So_ ,” she intoned, somewhat irate now. “I like them. And I wanted to keep them, so I did. I never said they’re…” She paused. “Who’s a famous painter?”

Kieran’s lips twitched into a grin. “Rembrandt.”

“I never said they’re _Rembrandt paintings,_ or something,” she huffed, tossing her palms up.

He spent a moment watching her. “You’re weird,” he said fondly.

She glared at him over the rim of her coffee mug, but he could just make out the hint of a blush blooming across the sharp planes of her cheekbones. “Where’d you learn to draw like that?”

“I’ve always been drawing, really. But I studied studio art in college.”

Her brows shot up, as though she wasn’t expecting to hear that. Most likely due to the fact that he spent most of his free time these days getting voluntarily beaten to a bloody pulp. 

“Can I ask you something?”

“You already have,” Kieran replied coyly.

Lauren rolled her eyes. “Why do you fight?”

Kieran fell quiet at that. It wasn't that he didn’t want to answer her. It was that he wasn’t allowed to.

He recalled the lash of the Messenger’s palm against his cheek during his initiation, his rough, sour breath hot against Kieran's face. _“Rule number one of fight club,”_ he had growled. _“You don’t talk about fight club.”_

Kieran blinked back into the present to find Lauren looking at him with regret written all over her pretty face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t have to answer that-”

And then, he decided that he simply didn’t give a fuck.

“No, it’s alright.” He folded his fingers and considered her question objectively. “I started it because it was expected of me. Later, I did it because I was good at it. Now, I do it because it makes money.”

She hesitated, her jaw working as she considered his statement. “You dislike it?”

He looked down at the table, his brows pulled together. “Not until recently.”

* * *

Kieran didn't tell her he was drawing her. He knew she’d be embarrassed. He stole glances when she wasn’t looking, studied the nuances of her sharp profile when was busy taking orders on her notepad, improvised the places that he knew he’d never be able to get quite right. A face like that could never be fully immortalized on paper, he knew, like light passing over a mirrorball. 

He left it tucked between the salt and pepper shakers.

* * *

He saw her face right before Flemmings knocked him out.

There was no fanfare to it. Just a steel-toed boot to his face and, right before blackness, a vision of her scowling at him, all swathed in that dirty blue light. He blinked into wakefulness on a concrete floor, sprawled out like a snow angel.

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” Kieran said to no one in particular.

“What are you talking about?”

Bella looked down at him with no concern in her expression, just a bored sort of curiosity, like a cat with a ball of yarn. Kieran sat up and scrubbed his palm over his dirty face. “Nothing.”

“I’m out a thousand dollars because of you.” When he said nothing, she flicked the butt of her cigarette, sending a piece of ash drifting to the ground like ticker tape. “What’s up with you lately?”

He braced his palms against the floor and stood unsteadily. “How long was I out?”

“Dunno. Found you like this.”

He didn’t realize he’d begun walking away until she called after him, the words faraway beneath the rush of blood in his ears. “Where are you going?”

Kieran stumbled into the evening, his mouth tasting like salt and things unsaid. “This is the last time you’ll see me here,” he said.

To her, and to himself.

* * *

He didn’t recall the walk there. Later, Lauren would tell him he looked like something out of a slasher film. She’d tell him that he never even made it into the diner, that she found him in the parking lot, propped up on the curb in the same place they’d met. She’d tell him that they didn’t need to bother with the poetic irony of that fact.

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” he said again, and she was cupping his bloodied face in her palms, scrubbing at his cheeks with a damp cloth.

Her eyes were furious. “You’re lucky the diner is dead right now.”

“I saw you.”

“What?”

“Before I got knocked out. I'm sure that’s supposed to mean something.”

Lauren huffed humorlessly. “Right.”

He brought his palm up to the side of his face, covering hers. “Ah,” he mumbled. “You don't think anything happens for a reason.” He swiped his tongue over his salty lip. “Practical _and_ depressing.”

Her palm felt like a warm, twitching bird under his own, a fickle, flightless thing. “You’re not some - some _show pony,_ Kieran,” she spat. “ _That_ didn’t happen for a reason.”

She was scrubbing at his face a little too hard, but it stung in the sort of way he knew would give way to something better. “I know,” Kieran said.

“Do you?” She snapped speculatively.

“Before I met you, I hadn’t drawn anything in months.” He lifted his hand to the side of her face and smoothed a loose strand hair behind her ear. He liked the way she shivered when the pads of his fingertips brushed over the shell of her ear, so he drifted them there for a moment. “A year, maybe.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t see the point.”

“The … point.” Her brows were drawn in, her lips pinched into a perplexed scowl. “I don’t follow.”

“I didn't see the point until I met _you_.”

Lauren's lips popped open into a round little “o”, but no sound came out. Then, after a long moment, she stood. She smoothed her wrinkled apron under her palm in a slow, repetitive circuit, her expression contemplative. It seemed like eons had passed in that little blue parking lot.

Kieran was half-wild with anticipation when she finally spoke, her voice firm with conviction. “Wait here.”

He blinked, then nodded. It wasn’t as though he had anywhere else to go. “That shouldn’t be difficult. I’m rather indisposed at the moment.”

Lauren lifted one shoulder in a shrug and then disappeared into the diner. She was gone for so long that he wondered if she’d slipped out a back door, not that he would have blamed her. When she finally came back outside with her jacket and a little rusty key dangling between her fingertips, he was struck with a wave of relief as visceral as a rush of blood to the head.

“I just closed the diner. You’re coming home with me,” she said. It sounded like the simplest thing in the world in her mouth, as though she’d just informed him the sky was blue, that the moon rises at nightfall. She was holding her hand out to him, palm up, a pale little getaway car.

He leaned back on his palms, watching her wryly. “Are you coming onto me?”

“You’re concussed,” she snapped. “Don’t be stupid.”

“I’ve never been propositioned so bluntly. Aren’t you supposed to take me to dinner first?”

She dropped her palm, scowling. “ _Fine_ ,” she hissed. “Bleed out on the sidewalk, then.”

She spun to leave and he captured her wrist between his forefinger and thumb, his fingertip pressed against her fluttering pulse-point.

And then, like it was the simplest thing in the world, he sprung to his feet and took her hand.

“If we’re talking semantics, you _have_ already taken me to dinner,” he mused. She looked down at their linked hands but made no move to disentangle them.

“Shitty diner waffles don’t count.”

“Sure they do, if they’re eaten at nighttime.”

They walked across the parking lot to her car, a sensible little Civic he could have identified as hers out of a lineup.

“And,” Lauren added. Her voice was a touch more uncertain. They stopped in front of her car and she spun to face him, crossing her arms over her chest. “I don’t want you to fight anymore. It’s stupid. And dangerous. And you’re a great artist, and…”

She hesitated when he took a step closer, bracing her between the car and his chest, his palms drifting over her hips.

“Please,” Kieran murmured, “Don’t stop on my account. You were at the part about me being a great artist.” His hands tightened around her hips, drawing her closer. She smelled so clean, like someone had figured out how to bottle sunshine.

“And so _humble,_ ” she added sardonically, her voice breathy. Her eyelids fluttered when he leaned forward and pressed his lips to the hinge of her jaw, light enough that it was more an exhalation of breath than a kiss, strictly, an abstraction of the thing. Her pulse pounded under his mouth.

“I haven’t had the desire to fight since the moment I met you. Why do you think I kept coming by the diner?” Kieran pulled back, one brow lifted. “It certainly wasn’t for your terrible coffee.”

She fixed him with a glare. “It’s not _that_ bad.”

“It’s dreadful,” he replied flatly.

“They won’t just let you go,” Lauren said. Her hands had tentatively inched up his shoulders and settled over the curling hair at the nape of his neck. Her touch was whisper-soft, as though she was drifting her hands over the surface of water. “Whoever’s making you do this.”

He leaned into her touch. “No,” he agreed.

She paused. “And, what?”

“That’s it.”

“You don’t have a plan?”

“No.”

“You’re so annoying,” Lauren said factually. And then she leaned forward on her toes and pressed her lips to his, finding that they were warmer and a little rougher than she expected them to be, like the warm grit of a sunburnt coastline she remembered visiting in childhood. Everything about him was a little nostalgic, every interaction something like a memory.

He froze, at first, surprised by her initiation. And then his mouth softened under hers, taking gentle control, his tongue swiping inquisitively at the seam of her lips, his hands backing her flush against the car. She parted her own lips in answer, breathing a sigh into his mouth that unfurled over his tongue like the answer to a prayer.

And then she pulled away, and it was all he could do not to howl at the absence of her mouth against his, cold air filling the gaps where she used to be.

“Is there any particular reason we’re no longer kissing?” He sputtered after a length. "Personally, I find it criminal.”

She looked him up and down in a series of haughty blinks. “You need a shower.”

Kieran drifted his thumb over his kiss-swollen mouth. “Is that another proposition?”

He hissed when she landed a surprisingly forceful punch against his bicep. “Alright, alright.” He tossed her a glare over the hood of the car, feigning annoyance. Truthfully, he thought she was at her best when she was bossing him around. It was so disastrously arousing he felt a bit like falling off a cliff.

And then he was tucking himself inside her neat, economical little Civic, all of that cold blue light behind them and all of that hazy dawn ahead. “You never did tell me,” he said. “Why do you even work here?”

Lauren twisted her key in the ignition. “I was planning on quitting the day I met you.” She ghosted her palm over the gearshift and hesitated, flicking a shy glance up at him.

“Why didn’t you?”

“I wanted an excuse to keep talking to you.”

“Bullshit,” he guffawed.

“It’s true. Now, however,” she said, edging out of the parking lot, “I couldn’t be happier to quit.” She laid one open palm over the glovebox and he captured it in his, drifting his fingertips over her heart line.

“Well, then,” Kieran replied, leaning back against the headrest. The first rays of morning spilled into through the windshield and rendered everything goldspun, and he closed his eyes against the warmth.

“Lead the way.”

**Author's Note:**

> Did y'all really think I wasn't going to give you a HEA after Rip Current? 
> 
> I really need to stop re-watching movies that inspire AU ideas. But also, I never realized how analogously the concept of the PS fits into a Fight Club premise. The ending is also partially inspired by Baby Driver - I love all of the dreamy, storybook light, the literal "driving off into the sun(rise)" trope. 
> 
> Thank you, as always, for reading. You make my heart happy.
> 
> -Rabbit


End file.
